


The One Where Lavellan is a Nug

by Feynite



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Crack, F/M, Nugs, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-13
Updated: 2015-11-13
Packaged: 2018-05-01 09:40:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5201114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Feynite/pseuds/Feynite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She wants it on the record that infiltrating Solas’ organization as a nug was never a plan that they had.</p>
<p>Not any of them.</p>
<p>Not even Sera.</p>
<p>Not even jokingly.</p>
<p>She wants it on the record.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The One Where Lavellan is a Nug

**Author's Note:**

> I have a 'Nug AU' now. It's like Bagel AU just wasn't cracky enough anymore. Blame tumblr. And Teemi, specifically. Blame Teemi.
> 
> It has helped keep me working on the next Looking Glass chapter without going insane, though. (Or possibly should be taken as proof that said chapter has, in fact, driven me off the deep end - your call, reader!)

She wants it on the record that infiltrating Solas’ organization as a nug was never a plan that they had.

Not any of them.

Not even Sera.

Not even jokingly.

She wants it  _on the record._  

Because who would even think of that? Nugs get eaten, as often as not. They are small and wrinkly and survive mainly by dint of swift procreation and fleeing. They’re very, very conspicuous, hairless, and nearly blind. Terrible infiltrators. Even if she was going for a small animal type thing, a cat would have been a thousand times better.

Just a regular cat.

…She blames Morrigan for this.

But it happened.

That’s just a truth that everyone is going to have to accept unless she can find a way to erase all evidence and memory of it, somehow.

She’s looking.

In the meanwhile, the stage of this catastrophe was thus:

One ancient elven temple, supposedly full of untold secrets focused on the mystic arts of transformation.

One party of intrepid adventurers cobbled together at the last minute, mostly from whoever was available when Morrigan turned up out of the blue to insist that they had to get to this thing  _right now_  before the Agents of Fen’Harel beat them to it (herself, Morrigan, and the most coherent half of the Chargers, who had just gotten back from a skirmish up near Seheron - Bull was down for a few days, at least, thanks to a gut wound).

One group of the anticipated Agents of Fen’Harel, sans their illustrious leader himself, arriving more or less concurrently and initiating the inevitable awkward stand-off that always ensues when their two groups meet because  _technically_  they’re enemies, but they also don’t tend to kill one another.

For reasons.

What followed, then, was something tragically like a mean-spirited campground footrace between uncommonly skilled children, as both parties simultaneously decided to just try and out-run the other to the temple and hope for the best. There was shoving. There was impolite but non-fatal use of spells. There was one glorious moment where Cremisius Aclassi leapt a fallen pillar, shouted ‘go on without me!’ and tackled three ancient elves in the most painful heap of limbs she had ever seen in her life.

She almost shed a tear, and knew Bull would be proud.

But in the end they were outnumbered and slightly disadvantaged in terms of available spell power and long-leggedness, and only she and Morrigan had pushed through to the temple, with six furious Agents hot on their heels. She’d gotten a barrier up, and quickly stamped down some runes to try and slow their progress. Morrigan, of course, had kept running towards her target.

That was when one of the agents - a former Circle mage, by the looks of her - had the brilliant idea to lob a massive electrical spell into the room, over the barrier. Likely in hopes of shocking them into submission. An ancient elven colleague of hers shouted a warning, but it came too late; the spell hit a glowing pillar in the middle of the room.

Boom.

She remembers Morrigan getting blasted backwards by the shockwave, and the room trembling, and one of the Agents actually calling out to them in concern before most of the chamber collapsed. She remembers a bolt of light from the pillar hitting her, and watching as a sea of rubble came crashing down towards her, and something in her  _twisted._

She remembers, afterwards, that the last animal she touched before they went to the temple was Leliana’s stupid pet nug.

The next thing she knows, everything is dark, and cramped, and kind of uncomfortable, but also… weirdly reassuring. She’s not usually a big fan of ‘cramped and dark’, but for a few minutes, even though there’s something sharp pressing into her side, she feels disoriented enough and  _frightened_  enough to just want to stay put.

Her heart is pounding.

Everything is wrong, and she is undoubtedly terrified.

There’s movement, from outside. From up above. Her first instinct is to stay put, and so she does, her nose twitching as she hears the rocks above go  _clunk, clunk,_  and smells magic on the air. The longer it goes on for, however, the more frightened she gets. Something is digging. Digging her out. She thinks that might be a good thing, but all of her instincts are screaming that it’s not; that it means teeth and claws and death.

The instinct to stay hidden and the instinct to flee the diggers war within her, and she finds herself moving, sniffing out another space in the rubble. She pushes through. Further back. It all feels wrong. She moves  _wrong_ , but… also right? She scurries, scrabbles a bit with her hands, and squeezes into the rocks further from the digging.

Some light spills in.

She shies away from it.

Over the pounding of her own heart, she can hear voices. Upset. One of them sounds familiar, she thinks, but she’s too scared and disoriented to venture out towards it. The rest don’t. The rest are… enemies? Maybe. Maybe enemies.

Her instincts translate ‘maybe enemies’ into ‘definitely enemies avoid at all costs’, and she holds very, very still.

Eventually, the tremors and movements and voices fade away. The predators move off, and the world goes still. The light begins to dim, a little, and she finally calms down enough to appreciate that strong sense of wrongness; to realize that, no, she absolutely should not be crawling into weird dark spaces and  _why does she have two hands_ , and oh, no.

They aren’t hands.

She scrambles out of hiding and panics again; actually ends up running around a bit before calming down enough to get a hold of her senses. Stumpy, naked limbs, on all fours, skin black as raven feathers, body shaped all wrong, and in the reflective segments of the temple floor, she sees a twitchy noes and floppy ears. And it’s hard to see, because her vision is very short-ranged all of a sudden, and the tiles haven’t been cleaned in centuries. But the reflection is still distinct enough to be undeniable.

She’s a nug.

She’s a  _nug._

That stupid pillar  _turned her into a nug._

Oh, she’s going to die.

Morrigan! She has to find Morrigan!

She runs around the chamber some more, panicking, which, thank you animal instincts, that really accomplishes  _just so much._

Eventually she gets a hold of herself - again - and takes better stock of the chamber. Light. There’s light pouring in through an opening in the wall. The wrong side of the wall, she thinks; it looks like the explosion blasted a hole in it, whilst caving in the entrance to the chamber.

Hopefully, no one was too badly injured.

(She will later learn that the only casualty was a three-legged mouse, who happened to be tragically crushed to death in the same collapsing rubble that luck and being turned into a nug saved her from.)

Her instincts hate the light, but she climbs towards it anyway. Maybe if she gets back to the temple entrance, she can find someone. Maybe, if she’s particularly lucky, it will be Morrigan, who probably won’t kill her on sight and also stands the best chance of realizing what’s happened to her.

Awkwardly, she clambers her way up the rubble, and hops down onto soft grass strewn with evening light.

She makes it to the temple entrance, but to her dismay, there’s no one there. Signs of the skirmish, yes, and she has to get frustrating close to things to see them at all. But her hearing has improved monumentally - sense of smell, too - and she can tell; no one. No one moving, breathing, shuffling around.

Damn.

She investigates until nightfall, hoping against hope that maybe someone is still just  _inside_  the temple.

When that doesn’t pan out, she figures she’s got a choice to make - she can either try and get back to the city, and hope no one murders her along the way, and that she can find someone who might plausibly take her for a person transformed into a nug and somehow convey her situation to them.

Or, she can stay here, and hope that, all things considered, someone comes back to try and figure out what exactly just happened to her.

She figures the latter option’s the one least likely to end in her getting skinned and eaten.

It’s a long night of waiting by the temple, though. She finds an overgrown crevice underneath some of the stairs, and her instincts want her to dig it out a bit. She gives in, because she figures they probably know more about hiding out as a nug at night than she does. Then she gets hungry, and…

Look.

She’s not going to say she ate some bugs.

But she will admit that  _nugs_  eat bugs, and also moss, maybe, a little, and she was hungry.

Whatever.

It was definitely just a few, anyway.

Things happen sometimes, and some decisions shouldn’t be judged by people who haven’t been turned into nugs.

By morning she’s drowsing in a state of low-grade terror, which she’s beginning to think is just what nugs run at by default. The light increases, and she fights the urge to burrow deeper and maybe sleep properly, because apparently nugs are nocturnal.

She hears footsteps.

She listens to them, fighting against her instinct to stay hidden as her higher functioning processes tell her that, no, hiding is probably the opposite of what she wants to do. It’s a struggle. The footsteps thunder overhead, and scare her so badly that it’s only when they return - slower, much, much slower - that she finally overcomes her terror and edges out of her hiding spot.

Light and exposure and not good,  _not good_.

She tamps down on the urge to retreat.

_Thump, thump,_ go the footsteps.

Then something drops, heavily, onto the temple stairs.

She blinks, and squints, and freezes for an entirely different reason.

Solas.

It’s Solas.

Not that she can see him clearly - he’s too far away; too indistinct - but his outline is one she knows too well to be mistaken. He’s clad in his armour, and he’s alone. Sitting on the steps, with his face in his hands. Slumped.

It’s strange, looking at him like this. It’s been months since she saw him last. Her instincts, so jangled up by this unexpected shift, like him, though. Recognize him as safe; as good. Her mind knows its more complicated than that. But she supposes, on balance, he could figure it out. And he’d probably help her, too.

She edges forward, nose twitching. His scent is familiar, but she’s never smelled it so strongly before. It’s layered with the odd metallic tang of his armour, and the fur from the pelt he’s wearing, and tired sweat, and salt.

Salt?

Carefully, she shuffles up the steps, and squints at him.

Oh no.

He’s crying.

Why is he crying? What’s happened? What does this mean?

She moves closer, trusting and unthinking in trying to see him better. He jolts a little, and she shies back, on reflex; but he only blinks at her, bleary-eyed and a little surprised.

For a moment, she debates on what to do.

Then she shuffles forward some more. Slowly. And nudges his left hand with her nose.

He very gently pushes her back. A kindly discouragement.

Then he starts crying again.

She feels wretched at the sight. He’s just… crying. A lot. It’s awful. She wants to hold him, but in lieu of that, she supposes she’ll just have to wait until he stops to get his attention again. He seems very set on weeping at the moment.

Still.

She sits beside him, and when he doesn’t push her away again, she leans at his hip.

His breaths comes in awful, gasping gulps, and he shudders.

Her desire to ask him what’s wrong manifests in a soft, inquisitive ‘squeak’, that she thinks goes mostly unnoticed, until he glances at her again.

He stares at her solidly for a little while, and she feels a tremor of hope.

_Quick, do something! Prove who you are!_

She’s a nug, though. There… isn’t a lot of working with that, really.

She nudges his hand again.

“I have nothing for you,” he says, in the saddest voice in the world.

Yeah, no, she’s not looking for scraps, here. She’s not hungry.

(Not that she ate around about fifty beetles, mind you. That’s not a thing that happened, and even if it did, no one else was around to see it, so it’s absolutely not making it into any records and nobody can prove it besides.)

Solas stands up.

_No! Dammit, vhenan!_

She headbutts him, but it just earns her another gentle, discouraging push. Then he sucks in a breath, and brushes away the dampness on his cheeks. Schools his features, and straightens his shoulders, and begins to walk from the temple.

She follows him.

He can walk fast when he wants to - those legs aren’t just for show - but nugs have four legs and are at least somewhat quick, so apart from occasionally losing sight of where she’s going and veering wildly off-course, she manages to keep pretty good pace with him. He heads into the jungle, and she finds herself wondering if there’s an eluvian nearby. She can’t see any other reason to trek over the animal trails he follows.

He keeps his head down.

After a while she starts walking directing in front of him, and staring up at his face.

_Vhenan! Come on!_

He nudges her sideways with his foot.

Stubbornly, she moves back into place again.

That’s when she hears it. The distant cracking of a twig; the rustling of movement. She pauses, and sniffs. Fear races down her spine. It makes her want to run and hide, but Solas is still walking, heedless of the danger.

Predator.

She catches up with him again, and shadows his steps with more caution. Her ears prick up, alert and wary. The sounds move closer. She nudges Solas’ leg, but he ignores her.

Rustle, rustle.

He doesn’t seem to have noticed - or cared - that the beast is almost upon them.  _Predator, predator, predator!_  She needs to find a burrow, some place to dig in, or at least get out of the light. But the instinctive need to hide wars with the deeper urge to protect, written into her elven mind if not her nug body. She needs to take Solas and burrow with him! No, you fool, he’s too big! She needs to run. But she can’t leave him! He’ll get eaten!

When the jungle cat leaps towards Solas, a blur of spotted fur and extended claws, the deciding moment is at hand.

She charges forward, and headbutts it before it can reach him.

He skull impacts against its ribs, and its not much, but it startles the beast out of its lunge. Her heart hammers so quickly that she’s sure it’s going to fly out of her chest, and the cat bats at her with its claws, raking open her unprotected side.

The wounds burn.

The cat turns to stone.

She blinks, lying on the ground.

_Oh, right,_  she remembers.

Solas is ungodly powerful now.

Well. 

So.

She’s going to bleed to death in the middle of the jungle as an unknown nug because she was an idiot.

…Almost fitting, in a weird way.

A shadow falls over her, and Solas looks down at her with wide, wide eyes. 

After a second, said eyes flash, briefly, and the wounds on her knit themselves closed.

Thank everything, she thinks, for his spirit of generosity; even in the face of whatever catastrophe has driven him to tears.

She sits up, and takes a few deep breaths, and then peers at him. Ears up, nose twitching, head tilted. He smells like salt again. The jungle cat is frozen statuary now, caught mid-swipe, like some stray artist just decided to decorate the wilds with one of its own denizens.

After a second, Solas kneels down, and extends to her his hand.

She nudges it.

“That was very brave,” he says, in a rough, quiet voice.

_More like idiotic,_  she thinks. But she’ll take the compliment.

She feels a surge of disappointment when he stands and starts walking again, though. With a deep internal sigh, she follows after him once more, ploughing her way through the overgrown trails until they finally reach a clearing where there is, indeed, an eluvian.

Solas walks towards it, and gives the password - she makes a mental note of it - and then pauses, and glances at her.

“Let’s see if you are brave enough for this as well,” he says, and steps through the shimmering portal.

She snorts, and immediately follows. No bravery required. It’s not like she’d rather stay in the jungle full of vicious cats.

They come out into the crossroads, of course. It feels different as a nug. Less… something. It’s hard for her to put her finger on it. She wonders if it’s the same way it seems to feel different to everyone who isn’t an elf, or if it’s because she’s an animal. Or maybe just because she’s so near-sighted and small.

Probably a contributing factor.

Solas peers down at her for a moment, and then starts walking again.

She follows him across winding, ruined pathways, and through another eluvian, and then out into what seems to be a different set of ruins. She clambers up massive stone steps behind him, far too many, really, especially for her short legs; and then at last she begins to stumble from the effort of it.

Still. He’s so damn fast, if she looks away for a minute he could vanish.

One foot after the other, then.

At least the ruins are dim enough that she’s not completely terrified.

She pulls herself up onto the top step at last, and heaves a squeaky sigh of relief; and then she looks up and sees that there’s another set of stairs, just as long and even more cracked than the last ones, and lets out a squeaky sigh of distress instead.

Solas moves ahead, and she pulls herself to her feet - which finally give out in exhaustion, and force her to flop over.

Nooo.

Failure.

She watches him walk away - again - and embraces the hope that whatever’s at the top of these stairs is some kind of base of operations, and if she just lies down for a minute, she’ll be able to carry on and find him again. Because all further efforts to get back up are failing.

Then Solas pauses.

He turns.

For another long moment, he stares down at her.

_Yes, hello there, love of my life,_  she thinks, wryly, with only the faintest hope that realization has dawned.

Carefully, he bends down, and scoops her up.

Her hopes surge, but die down again when he only carries her. She’s pretty sure that if he’d even just vaguely suspected, he would have at least said her name or something. Given her a cue to respond to. Instead he takes her with him up the last flight of steps, and she sees that, at least, she was right about it being a secret base.

In Antiva, she guesses. Just going off of the foliage.

Well. On the bright side, at least she’s in his arms again. That’s sort of nice, circumstances aside.

It’s less nice when he hands her off to one of his peons, with instructions to give her water and food and a clean, soft box to sleep in, because apparently he thinks she’s someone’s pet who somehow got stranded in the middle of the jungle, and not Former Inquisitor Lavellan, Currently a Nug and Deeply Fed-Up.

Thus begins her tenure as the most ridiculous spy no one ever intended.

(Again, for the record - not intended. Not a plan that was ever approved, or even suggested. By anyone.  _Ever._ )

She learns a lot, though. More than one would expect nature’s most vulnerable prey animal to ever garner. But heightened hearing is pretty good for listening in on conversations, and she has a decent memory, even as a nug. Though Leliana did say that nugs remember stuff ridiculously well.

As it happens, the Agents of Fen’Harel do not know anything at all about nug care. She gratefully accepts the offer of water, and eats what seem to be dried trail rations, and then drinks more water because her throat feels like sandpaper. Then she is placed into a box, with some straw thrown on the bottom.

The straw hurts her feet.

As soon as her would-be caretaker turns around, she tiredly trundles out of the box, and goes and finds a dark corner to rest in instead.

Here’s what she learns while she is in the corner:

\- Solas’ people are ridiculously devoted and a little absurd in their opinion of him, and will, in fact, panic when they realize that ‘Lord Fen’Harel’s nug’ is missing.

\- No one calls him ‘Lord Fen’Harel’ to his face but apparently  _everyone_  does it behind his back.

\- Ancient elves are not talented nug-hunters.

\- Ancient elves will resort to magic in order to try and accomplish basically any task, up to and including nug-hunting.

\- Misfired tracking spells that rely on magical tenets no longer in operation smell terrible.

\- Apparently, everyone thinks she’s dead - the real her, not the nug version - and they’re all walking on eggshells because ‘Lord Fen’Harel’ had a known ‘admiration’ for the Inquisitor.

\- Ancient elves talk about romance the same way the nobles in Varric’s historical romance novels do.

Around when she feels energetic enough to start moving again - which happens after just a short nap, basically - Solas emerges from whatever sad and probably majestic chamber he’d briefly retired to. The air is strangely tense until she pads out of the corner to go meet him, and then everyone seems to breathe an unexpected sigh of relief.

She stops in front of Solas, and looks up at him.

_Your people are weird about you,_  she thinks.

Are her people that weird about her when she’s not around?

She really, really hopes not.

Solas glances at her, but that’s the most acknowledgement she gets out of him. His face looks fine; but when she sniffs, he smells salty again.

She tries to think of ways to convince him of who she is as she proceeds to follow him around his secret hidden base of operations. And also collects secret hidden information about the secret hidden base of operations, because obviously. Leliana would kill her otherwise.

Solas doesn’t try and nudge her away, although the most encouragement he offers is to occasionally hold a door open just a beat too long, so she can follow him through. And he also refuses to let her out onto what seems to be a balcony with no railings, overlooking a waterfall.

She has to watch him stand there for several minutes, with his arms behind his back, looking out at the distance.

When he comes back in, he smells salty again.

This is how she learns that Solas cries  _all the time,_ apparently.

Well. Whenever other people aren’t watching, at least.

…Other people who aren’t currently trapped in the body of a nug.

But basically, every so often he wanders off, determined as if he is about to attend Important Secret Business, and every time, without fail, he cries. Sometimes even when he is doing what actually seems to be Important Secret Business, just so long as he’s alone.

It makes it very hard to be annoyed at his inability to realize that she’s not actually a nug, because it is gut-wrenchingly awful and she just wants to make him less sad, really.

When she gets too tired, again, to keep following him around the Secret Base of Staircases Not Designed to be Nug-Accommodating, he hands her off to another one of his agents, who then tries to put her back in the stupid painful straw box, and puts something heavy on top of it this time.

As soon as she hears the footsteps moving away, she knocks the heavy thing off, and goes back to the corner.

The next day passes much the same as the first one, and with just as few results to show for it. She flexes her creepy nug hands and tries to write her name, but one of the agents pries her away from the writing implements before she can. She follows Solas until he heads towards the eluvian again, and then hands her off to another one of his people before walking through.

Then she gets to listen to his peons debating what nugs may or may not actually eat, and endure them attempting to feed her various things, and has to wonder if they really don’t have anything more important to do.

Other than gossip, obviously. Which they also do.

A lot.

She and Solas are apparently a hot topic, especially now that she’s ‘dead’. Speculation runs rampant as to the true extent of their ‘affections’ and whether or not he’s going to go on some kind of rampage, and also whether or not the elf who threw the lightning spell that caused the whole incident can expect to live with nightmares for all eternity as punishment.

_It’s Solas, you idiots; she didn’t do it on_ purpose, she thinks.

But then again… there have always been things about him that she didn’t know.

She wishes she could say that she only required another day to come up with a brilliant solution for proving herself, and getting out of ‘enemy’ territory and back into her own body again.

She really does.

But as it stands, things sort of develop into a bizarre routine. She sleeps in her corner, and, once the Agents realize that she’s not running off and getting into any trouble there, they stop trying to put her into the box. She follows Solas around when he’s present, though she is still barred from the Balcony of Tears Running Like a Majestic Waterfall of Sorrow, and the eluvian. And the agents think its cute that she’s so fascinated with ink and pens but don’t let her have any because they could possibly hurt her.

_I will possibly hurt_ you, she thinks, at the elf who asserts that.

But for a group of world-ending radicals, they’re not so bad.

(She already knew that, though).

Finally, day eight is a particularly bad day for Solas’ crying jags. That night she gives up her corner and, through dint of truly  _spectacular_  effort involving two crates and a wooden fork, manages to get the door to his room open.

Sure enough, he’s sitting on the bed, slumped and tired and  _still wearing his armour_ , and crying.

She nudges the door closed behind her, and hops over to him, and headbutts his shin.

He blinks down at her.

_Please tell me you don’t sleep in shiny gold-plated thigh armour these days,_  she thinks.

After a moment, he leans down, and scoops her up, and deposits her onto the bed. It’s a pretty big bed, although the room itself isn’t too fancy. Apart from all the paint.

She squints at his murals.

If he thinks she’s dead, no wonder he’s crying in here.

There’s… well.

There’s a theme to his work in this room, and a certain familiar elven woman appears to be part of it. Not in a creepy ‘pictures of her face everywhere’ kind of a way, thankfully; it’s more like a general vibe. She only seems to actually appear in a few places - standing high at the top of a mountain, holding hands with him at the mouth of a glen, and then standing one-armed and alone, reaching towards an empty eluvian.

She remembers that.

She wonders if he actually saw her, or if he just knew anyway.

Apart from that, though, it’s tendrils and forests, and light holding darkness at bay. And longing, somehow. She’s not sure how she gets the feeling. Maybe just in the wolves constantly howling; in the way the lines of the artwork reach towards her, and then curl away at the last moment. 

It makes her want to join in on the weeping.

Some of it she misses, she knows; its a lot of blurry shapes on the wall further from the bed, and on the ceiling. She thinks about hopping down for a closer look. But Solas is crying again.

With a consoling squeak, she bumps up against his side.

He lowers a hand, very carefully, to her head.

Eventually - to her great relief - he gets up and puts on some more comfortable-looking clothes. He looks haggard and worn, with dark circles under his eyes, and hollows below his cheeks. It makes her worry about the toll this dark path of his is taking on him.

He lets her to stay on his bed as he climbs below the covers, and she nestles up against his back.

_I wish we could just figure this out together,_  she thinks.

Nugs, much like dwarves, don’t seem to dream, though. So even there, now, she can’t reach him.

But apparently, ancient transformation spells do have a shelf life.

She wakes up in the middle of the night, clad in her gear again, with her arm curled around a sleeping Solas.

Her  _arm._

Singular, and long enough to have  _around_  Solas.

It’s like she’s just been squashed flat and stretched out. Her magic is still a bit muddled, and so is her head. She feels a strange, confused urge to just grab Solas and go hide with him under a rock somewhere, and that almost makes sense except she knows that she can’t. For some reason.

He shifts in her grasp.

She knows the exact moment when he wakes up, because he tenses and then turns, so furious that even in the dark she can practically feel it pouring off of him. A whisper and there’s light, and he looks at her and she can’t move and…

…His expression crashes.

Finally, all of the pieces click together. She sees it happening, almost in slow motion, and she has no idea at all how he’s going to react. Because he thought she was dead and he thought she was a nug and now she’s neither and also in his bed with him.

He kisses her.

Pretty good reaction, as it goes.

She kisses him back and cradles his face, and draws him in close. He puts his arms around her and cries some more, despite some obvious efforts not to, and it’s much better now because she can run her hand down his back and promise him it’s going to be alright, call him vhenan and whisper her love to him.

Didn’t she say she would save him?

He can’t possibly have imagined she would die before she did.

Finally, he sucks in a deep, deep breath, and sags against her.

“My apologies for failing to realize,” he says.

“It’s alright. I don’t strike myself as particularly ‘nug-like’ either,” she allows.

“In hindsight, the jaguar should have tipped me off.”

“Probably.”

She leans over and presses her lips to his temple.

“You cannot stay,” he whispers.

His hands clench against her, briefly, as if he wishes he could have said the opposite.

She hums.

“I’ve just spent eight days running around your secret base. I’ve learned every password, I know its location and that of several others, and I’ve figured out how many active eluvian networks you have and what the code names are for three of your operating groups. And also your cipher. How quickly do you want me to go back?” she asks.

He pauses.

“…Delaying that  _would_  probably allow at least a few operations to complete before we have to uproot everything,” he says.

“Really, you’re just serving the cause by distracting me,” she replies.

Her own mission, after all, has rather different priorities. Like wearing down the Dread Wolf’s stubborn resistance.

On that front, she thinks she takes the night.

At dawn, while he’s pretending to be asleep, she slips out of his bed. She unhooks an old charm from her necklace, and presses it into his palm, and curls his fingers around it. So he won’t forget.

She’s going to save him.

Then she takes a proper look at his murals. Beautiful. Aching. A sigh drifts out of her, and she turns away, and slips past the patrolling Agents to whisper the password to the eluvian, and goes.

So possibly the Nug Infiltration may yet prove to be an invaluable turning point in history’s events.

But really.

_Really._

She thinks it would be better if no one ever mentioned it again.

(And she would very much appreciate it if the Agents of Fen’Harel could stop calling her ‘Squeakers’, thanks.)

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] The One Where Lavellan Is A Nug](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5227808) by [ealianarrain](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ealianarrain/pseuds/ealianarrain), [Feynite](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Feynite/pseuds/Feynite)




End file.
